The Tory and the Collective

In the twentieth century there were several attempts to define “left” and “right” in their political sense, as poles governing the political spectrum. Such attempts by their very nature were misleading as they required the reduction of complex political views to something so simple that it could be plotted on a chart. Thus the effort tended to be self-defeating, producing confusion where clarity was intended.

An example of these oversimplified spectrums was that of individualism v. collectivism with individualism being the right pole and collectivism being the left pole. As I pointed out in my last essay, my own political outlook of Toryism – the classical conservatism that upholds royal and ecclesiastical authority for the common good of the whole society – does not chart well on this spectrum because it is both individualist and collectivist, but individualist in a different sense than the classical liberal and collectivist in a different sense than the contemporary leftist. I then explained the difference between Tory individualism and classical liberal individualism. In this essay I intend to explain the difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism.

Collectivism, in a general sense of the word, is a way of thinking in which the emphasis is placed on the group rather than the individual. In the context of economics it ordinarily suggests some form of socialism or communism, which is one of the reasons for the association between collectivism and the left. Toryism, however, can also be legitimately described as collectivist. When Naim Attallah asked Enoch Powell what it means to be a Tory in a 1998 interview, in his answer, the famous Tory statesman remarked that a Tory “reposes the ultimate authority in institutions – he is an example of collective man.” (1)

Note that Powell spoke of institutions – plural – rather than “an institution” – singular. In this, the most fundamental difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism can be seen. The Tory believes in a plurality of collectives, each with its own sphere of influence, starting at the local level with examples such as the family, the local neighborhood, and the church parish. We could call this the horizontal plurality of collectives. The Tory also believes in a vertical plurality of collectives, which means that at the higher level of the national society he sees collectives of collectives, rather than merely collectives of individuals.

The Anglican Church, at one time known as the “Tory Party at prayer”, is a good illustration of what I mean. At the national level, in my country, you have the Anglican Church of Canada. Within that there are four ecclesiastical provinces. Each of these consists of several dioceses, which in turn are made up of multiple parishes. Each parish is a collective, within a collective, within a collective, within a collective – and you could extend the number of collectives further since the Anglican Church of Canada is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which in turn is part of the larger Christian Church.

When we enter the realm of politics, the Parliament that writes Her Majesty’s laws for us in Ottawa, writes them, for better or for worse, for the entire country of Canada, which includes ten provinces and three territories with governments of their own, which in turn consist of several cities, townships, and rural municipalities with local governments.

The Tory places a great deal of emphasis upon the importance of both the horizontal and the vertical plurality of collectives. Society, for him, is not and should not be a mere aggregation of equal individuals who just happen to live in the same place, at the same time, under the same government, but is a living thing, in which individuals and groups, join together in different ways and at different levels to form an organic whole.

Leftist collectivism is not like this. It is very much about a single collective, which it calls “the people”. This collective, has but a single institutional expression, that of the state. The Tory and the leftist both believe in an institution they call “the state.” Both would say that the state is the institution that passes laws for the common good of the society, but this is where the coincidence of their views of the state ends. The Tory holds to a classical view of the state, grounded in the thought of the ancients, whereas the lefist holds to a modern view of the state, that can be traced to the eighteenth century philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The difference is sufficiently large to justify the assetion that the Tory and the leftist are talking about two different institutions.

The Tory sees the state as one of many institutions, albeit the highest in any given society, vested, as Enoch Powell said, with authority. More specifically, the Tory sees the highest authority in society (2) as vested in the royal sovereign, and the state as the institution (3) that excercises that authority. The left’s ideal, on the other hand, is the democratic state, an institution that is the voice of the people, expressing what Rousseau called their “volonté générale”. Such a state, is the embodiment of power rather than authority, a fact openly acknowledged by the left in their oft-heard slogan “power to the people”. The difference between authority and power is that authority is the right to command, whereas power is the strength to coerce. All government must have a degree of power backing its authority to ensure its stability but civilized government does not rely upon this power except in cases of necessity because the overuse of power undermines authority. In the left’s ideal state, where the people and government are one, power is everything, specifically the strength of the numbers which is the force of the mob.

The left, to reiterate, cares about one collective, the people, and one institution, the state, and its goal is to make the latter the full political expression of the voice and collective will of the former. Who do the left mean when they speak of the people?

In the early days of the left, when it was the party of revolution seeking to overthrow the ancient, classical, and Christian order, the people were the governed as opposed to the established authorities. In the nineteenth century, a specific political phenomenon known as nationalism sprung from the roots of Rousseau’s philosophy and the French Revolution. We don’t often think of nationalism as being leftist today, but it was recognizably so then, and in this stage of the left, the people were the nation, that is, an ethnic group defined by a common racial ancestry, language, religion, and other cultural markers. The leftist nationalists sought to overthrow the royal houses and the Catholic Church to establish the democratic nation-state, embodying the voice of their particular nation. In the twentieth century, the left moved on from the nation, and began to speak of the people in international terms and on a global scale. This evolution of leftist thought is quite in keeping with the left’s avowed progressivism, when we consider Canadian Tory philosopher George Grant’s description of progress as the movement of history towards a “universal and homogeneous state”.

Nineteenth century leftist nationalism, in its attempt to create democratic nation-states, was suspicious of the other collectives and other institutions that had claims on people’s loyalties and affections, and insisted that one’s loyalty to the nation-state be undivided and come before all other loyalties. Today this is what leftists insist upon such loyalty to all of humanity and perhaps to a future democratic world state that will embody the voice of this global scale people. It is here that the leftist collectivist and the liberal individualist approach each other, in their mutual distrust of the plurality of traditional, organic, collective institutions that share claims on our loyalties. From different starting points, the leftist and liberal arrive at mass society, the single large collective, first on a national scale now growing internationally to the global scale, that is an aggregate of equal, undifferentiated, individuals rather than a many-layered organism.

Nothing could be further from Tory collectivism than this.

(1) https://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/
(2) The authority of God is higher, but that is an authority that transcends society, rather than an authority within society.
(3) NB, that the state in the Tory view, is a collective institution, made up of several institutions of which the two Houses of Parliament, the various ministries, and the Courts are examples.

Principles and Prejudices

The old year has passed away, a new year is upon us, and that means that once again it is time for my traditional “where I stand” essay. This tradition did not begin with me but with one of my favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who retired from the Orlando Sentinel in 2001 and from his syndicated column in 2008. Reese believed writers owed it to their readers to make a full disclosure of their views, affiliations, and everything that gave them their particular slant once a year and encouraged other writers to do this by setting an example himself, devoting one column around New Years, sometimes the last of the old year, sometimes the first of the new, to doing this. I liked the idea and have kept this tradition myself every year since I started “Throne, Altar, Liberty”, beginning with the essay “Here I Stand” in 2011.

I am a Canadian. I am furthermore a Canadian nationalist, although I dislike this term and would prefer the older term patriot. In Canada, however, it is the custom for patriots to refer to themselves as nationalists, just as in the republic that is our neighbour to the south it is the custom for nationalists to refer to themselves as patriots. Patriotism consists of loyalty, attachment to, and love for, one’s country, its traditions, and its way of life. It is a feeling, a sentiment, and even, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued convincingly, a virtue. It develops naturally as an outgrowth of the smaller attachment one feels to one’s family, home, and what Edmund Burke memorably called “little platoons”. Nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology. In nationalism one’s nation or country is not a beloved home to be defended when attacked but a cause around which to rally the masses. It does not develop naturally but requires indoctrination. When I say that I am a Canadian nationalist, in keeping with my country’s custom, what I really mean is that I am a Canadian patriot as I have just explained the term. I was born in Canada, raised in Canada, have lived in Canada all my life up until now, and intend to live in Canada for the remainder of my life. I feel about Canada the same way I feel about my family and friends, about the people and places I have always known and loved.

There is another kind of Canadian nationalism, one which actually is a form of nationalism rather than patriotism. Peter Brimelow aptly described this kind of Canadian nationalism as “one of the toadstools of history”. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that was historically associated with the Liberal governments of Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien, with the new school of Canadian historians that was partial to these governments – think Peter C. Newman and Pierre Berton – and which seems to be the only kind of Canadian nationalism our public broadcaster, the CBC, is interested in. This is the kind of Canadian nationalism that John Farthing described as the “pure-Canada cult” in his excellent book Freedom Wears a Crown, which is among other things the classic rebuttal of this cult. This kind of Canadian nationalism sees the Canadian identity as something Canada needed to forge anew after WWII and from which everything our country inherited from Great Britain needed to be either excluded and eliminated or underplayed and ignored. I loathe and detest this kind of Canadian nationalism. The Canada of which I am a patriot, is the country confederated under its own Parliament based on the British model in 1867, which obtained full sovereignty over her own affairs through evolution rather than revolution, by growing up within the British family of nations under our shared monarch, rather than by severing family ties. I see our country’s heritage of Loyalism, not just as manifested in the American Revolution but when Canada stood by Britain from the beginning of the Second World War, as the top of the list of things for which Canadians can rightly take pride in our country.

I am a Christian, and while I look back upon my evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, when I knelt down to pray and told the Lord Jesus Christ I accepted Him as my Saviour, as the beginning of my Christian experience, I no longer use the word Christian in its evangelicalese sense of someone who has had such a conversion, but in the more traditional sense of someone who holds to the faith affirmed in the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. I was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church when I was a teenager and more recently confirmed by a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada. I am reformed in my understanding of justification – that salvation is a work in which God is the only actor, accomplished for us in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, freely given to the world by grace and received simply through faith, and catholic in my understanding of the Church as the body of Christ, established by Christ through His Apostles to continue His incarnational presence in the world after His Ascension back to the right hand of the Father in Heaven by the collective indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and commissioned by Him to bring His grace to the world through the ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Politically I am a Tory. By referring to myself as a Tory I do not mean to indicate my support for any political party but rather my holding to a set of political convictions. In Canada, like other countries with a Conservative Party, this distinction is often made by use of the expression “small c conservative”, but I prefer the term Tory, despite the potential for confusion, because my political convictions are closer to those of the Tory Party of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, than of the Conservative Party into which it was reorganized early.in the nineteenth century. I believe that human beings are by nature social beings who are born not as individuals but as members of pre-existing social groups, from their families up through their local communities to their nations, and that while it is good and natural for people to develop a sense of individuality within these groups as they mature it is bad for them to become alienated and isolated, and that these social groups from the family up to the nation, are best regarded as organic wholes in which past and future generations are included with those living in the present. I believe, therefore, that governments should rule with the good of their societies viewed as such organic wholes in mind. Therefore, our most important civil institution is the office of the monarch. The monarch can represent the organic whole of a society, including past and future generations, in a way no elected politician ever could, because the royal office is filled not by popular election but by a line of succession and so embodies the principle of continuity. For the same reason the office of monarch is vested with something far more valuable and important than the power politicians obtain through winning elections – sovereign authority. Power is the strength to compel obedience, authority is the right to command obedience. The man who wins an election, whether as representative of his constituency by obtaining the largest number of its votes or as leader of the government by obtaining the support of the largest number of representatives in the legislative assembly, obtains thereby a form of power – the strength of numbers. While power in this form can come from below, true authority can only come from above, from a source that transcends politics in the sense of the struggle for power. Whether that source is conceived of as constitutional order, prescription (long established custom), divine right, or a combination of these, the office of monarch is uniquely suited to be the representative of both the transcendental source of authority and the organic whole of society. The office of monarch is also the safeguard of our social and civil order against the threat of tyranny, a threat which when it arises, almost always comes from a demagogue who claims to be the voice of the “will of the people”. It is well that in our constitution the institutions of senate and elected assembly make up the state together with and under the monarch, joining, in Stephen Leacock’s words “the dignity of kingship with the power of democracy” so long as we remember that for a government to be truly civilized, authority must take precedence over power and power must support authority. These convictions are what I mean when I describe myself as being a Tory.

While it is obvious that holding to a royalism rooted in an organic view of society in which the community precedes the individual is incompatible with an acceptance of the individualism and contractual view of society that is the underlying philosophy of libertarianism, I nevertheless, with a few important qualifications and exceptions, usually agree with the libertarians on questions of whether the government should legislate or not. I fully agree with satirical novelist and High Tory Evelyn Waugh’s libertarian statement that while men cannot live together without rules these “should be kept at the bare minimum of safety.”

I do not share the libertarian’s faith in the ability of market forces, unimpeded by legislation, to bring about a perfectly just distribution of goods and wealth but I do share his contempt for socialism’s confidence in the ability of government planners to do a better job of it. I think that under ordinary circumstances people as individuals, families, and other groups and organizations, know and are better able to manage their own business than anyone else and that governments should let them do so without intrusion and interference. This does not mean pure laissez-faire because, while governments cannot possibly manage any person or group’s business better than that person or group, much less the business of every person and group in the country, government’s can and ought to be able to manage the business of the country as a whole. A farmer, for example, does not need the government to come in, boss him around, and tell him how to run his own farm. A country, however, which needs a healthy agricultural industry to ensure an uninterrupted food supply, may need government to protect the industry if it is threatened.

Social legislation that ensures that a basic standard of living is within the reach of every member of society so that nobody goes without food, clothing, shelter or health care due to old age, infirmity, economic recession or depression, or other factors beyond their control, but only through their own bad choices is a necessity in any civilized country today but this too ought to be kept at the bare minimum. Those who support a more expansive social safety net frequently accuse those of us who try to keep it minimal of a lack of generosity, compassion, and Christian charity but when governments can only pay for these programs with money they have obtained by taxing their people, generosity, compassion, and charity have nothing to do with it. It is not generous, compassionate, or charitable to give to one person what one must first take from another. There is no virtue in being liberal, let alone magnanimous, with other people’s money. Furthermore, the expansion of basic social legislation into a welfare state can hardly be described as compassionate and charitable when it clearly contributes to illegitimacy, the break-up of families, children growing up without fathers, high rates of violent crime, and intergenerational poverty and dependence among the poorest sectors of society. The proper end of social legislation is not to try and achieve the unattainable and false ideal of equality but to alleviate misery and so prevent the kind of dissatisfaction and unrest that could threaten the civil and social order.

Often libertarians will say that government should not pass laws pertaining to morality but this is nonsense which displays an appalling ignorance of the nature of both laws and morality. Morality is a system in which human behaviour is classified into the categories of right or wrong. Laws are always statements about morality. Every law says either a) a certain behaviour is wrong in itself and hence prohibited or b) that a certain behaviour is prohibited and therefore wrong. That having being said, governments ought not to pass laws against everything that is morally wrong but only against acts which cause injury to other people, the institutions of society, and the civil order. It is enough that the police maintain the Queen’s peace, they do not need to be Mrs. Grundy’s enforcer as well.

Many today go further than this and say that questions of morality, right and wrong, are private and personal, to be decided by the individual rather than the community or society. This too is nonsense. Yes, every man must make his own moral decisions, but this means choosing his own actions not creating his own personal system of morality. The morality of his community, society, and civilization, contained in its mores and folkways, customs and habits, stories and songs, religion and culture, is the indispensable instrument by which he learns to make moral decisions and to cultivate virtues and it is the role of his parents and priests, family and church, community and its elders, to provide him with this means. This is not the role of the State and the State ought not to usurp this role nor should it undermine the efforts of the institutions and authorities whose role it is.

There are many today who look upon the last several decades since the end of the Second World War as an unprecedented Golden Age of human enlightenment in which we have made great strides towards achieving freedom, prosperity, and racial, sexual, and social equality. I am not one of those. When I look at the same decades I see the moral, spiritual, social, and cultural disintegration of my country and the wider Western Civilization to which it belongs, often in the very things those progressives consider to be “advances” over which to pat themselves on the back. If the equality of the sexes, for example, is a laudable ideal then it follows that artificial contraception and abortion must be legal, affordable, and universally accessible, for as long as women are getting pregnant, bearing, giving birth to, and nursing children with their bodies, their choices as much as those of men will ensure that the roles of the sexes will be different and not fully interchangeable, hence not equal. Abortion is the deliberate termination of innocent human life by the will of the person upon whom that life is dependent and whose instinct and duty is to protect it. It is difficult to conceive of any greater evil. George Grant was quite right when he described the arguments made in favour of it as the fascist concept of the triumph of the will masquerading behind the language of liberalism.

These revolutionary moral, social, and cultural changes are always spoken of in the language of liberation by those who look positively upon them just as they depict us who take the negative view as being puritanical zealots who wish to impose a narrow morality upon society by force of law. I find it difficult to understand how the replacement of social and cultural taboos against sexual immorality which were deeply rooted in tradition and the wisdom of the ages with newly coined taboos against thoughts and words that are deemed to be “politically incorrect”, i.e., objectionable to the brutally inflexible ideology of egalitarianism, can possibly be regarded as being liberating. Surely telling a man what he can and cannot think and say is far more intrusive than telling him that if he gets a woman pregnant he should do right by her and the child. Furthermore, these changes did not just happen on their own due to forces outside our control. They happened because those who wished to bring them about obtained enough influence in the State so as to be able to use its power to tamper and experiment with the social and moral order.

An example of this is how the law has been used to change the fundamental nature of marriage. I do not mean the recent change to include same-sex couples – that is merely a superficial consequence of the real change, albeit one that is already proving to have its own deleterious consequences on what Roger Scruton calls “the autonomous institutions” of civil society, as pressure is being placed upon religious-based educational institutions like Trinity Western University and will eventually, as everyone who is not a complete moron can see, be placed upon clergy and churches as well, to change their teachings and practices so as to be in accord with the change made in the civil law. The real change to marriage was the introduction of no-fault, easy divorce. This transformed marriage from a permanent union, formed by solemn vows, to which both partners are expected to make sacrifices of self into a temporary arrangement of convenience between couples, easier to get out of than a business partnership, that comes with legal perks. By creating no-fault divorce, government divorced marriage from all the reasons for which the institution exists in the first place and undermined other social authorities. The church is robbed of its authority if, after the priest proclaims the words of Christ, “what God has joined together let no man put asunder”, a judge is able to sign the union out of existence the next day without any fuss or muss.

I would like, of course, as one who willingly accepts the label of reactionary, to see all these changes reversed, just as I would like to see the general decay in Western thought of which they merely the most recent manifestation reversed. We have gone from thinking of the Good, the True the Beautiful as transcendent realities, that are what they are, and which it is our duty to pursue and approach to the best of our imperfect ability to thinking that they are whatever we decide them to be for ourselves. It took all the centuries of the Modern Age to bring this about but now, in what is awkwardly and absurdly called the Postmodern era, we have in a few short decades done to such visible realities as sex, what we had previously done to the invisible, transcendental, realities. Where this process of decay and disintegration may lead us next if it continues much longer, I shudder to think.

On that cheery note it is time to bring this essay to a close.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen

Change and Reaction

Conservatives are fortunate to have enemies who are always trying to help them out. The foes of the conservative – liberals, socialists, bleeding hearts, leftists, do-gooders, and everybody else who falls under the general umbrella of “progressives” – are always trying to tell us who we are and what our role is. Or rather, they are always trying to tell us who we are not and what our role is not. The “true conservative”, they tell us, is never a reactionary. There are those within the conservative camp who would echo this sentiment, particularly those on the left wing of conservatism, but I think this is a mistake, not only because by doing so we are allowing our opponents to define us and thus giving them an advantage over us, but because what they are telling us simply does not hold up to scrutiny.

Indeed, the only way the claim that the true conservative is never a reactionary would make sense would be if we accepted the definitions of conservative and reactionary which state that the former is the person trying to preserve the present status quo and the latter is the person trying to restore the status quo ante. If we accept these definitions, then, of course, a conservative and reactionary could never be the same person for their purposes are at odds with each other. These definitions, however, are notoriously woefully inadequate.

It is not that difficult to see what the Left gains by insisting upon this claim. Progressives see themselves as being the advocates of socially beneficial change. They grudgingly acknowledge a legitimate role for the conservative as the voice of caution, to argue the con-side against their changes as they propose them, but who, once they change has been made, is supposed to accept it as being written in stone and never attempt to reverse it. If the conservative accepts this limitation on his role then all the progressive has to do is obtain enough support at any given time to make a particular change and then he need never worry about defending that change from conservative attack ever again but can indeed, rally the conservatives to defend his changes against the reactionaries who would seek to undo them. It also boosts confidence in the progressive vision of history in which every change introduced by a progressive is seen as a positive step, moving history along in a linear fashion, towards a future, better, and more just society.

For the conservative to accept the role assigned to him by the progressives, however, would be to reject some of the most basic principles of conservatism. This is one of the reasons why I prefer the older term Tory. The newer label, conservative, has connotations of caution, risk-avoidance, and resistance to change, all of which are good enough in themselves but none of which, singularly or taken together, make much of an argument against the progressive definition of the role of the conservative. The same can hardly be said of the term Tory which from the seventeenth century has been the party of church and state, standing for apostolic authority in the former and the rights and prerogatives of the monarch in the latter. There is no way that this can be reduced to a mere defence of whatever the status quo happens to be at the present movement.

Indeed, the history of the Tories in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries very much gives the lie to the claim that a conservative – or a Tory at any rate – can never be a reactionary.

The antecedents of the Tories in the late seventeenth century were the Royalists or Cavaliers who fought for King Charles I in the English Civil War in the 1640s. They lost, the king was arrested, charged with treason in a mock trial conducted in a Parliament from which all of his supporters had been removed by the force of arms by the triumphant New Model Army of the Puritans, then murdered and martyred. After a mercifully short interregnum in which, under the evil dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans cancelled Christmas and Easter, stripped the churches of everything that was visually or audibly aesthetically pleasing, closed the theatres, forbade harmless amusements on the Lord’s Day, and basically went out of their way to make everybody gloomy and miserable, Charles II was restored to his father’s throne and the Church of England with its bishops, King James Bible, and a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer that would become the standard edition was brought back, in what was the most spectacular and successful act of reaction in the history of the world – the English Restoration.

Then, when the Tories lost the battle against the Whigs in 1688, and James II was ousted from the throne by Parliament and replaced by his son-in-law and daughter, those Tories who remained loyal to the House of Stuart, including the non-juror bishops of the Church of England, became the reactionary Jacobites who tried unsuccessfully to restore James and later his son Charles to the throne. While the case can certainly be made that the Jacobites acted unwisely it can also be argued that they were the most true to the principles of the Tory Party. Such later High Tories as Dr. Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century and Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth, while loyal to the kings of the Hanoverian succession, nevertheless looked back on the Jacobites with sympathy and romanticism.

At any rate, within the space of a single century (the last Jacobite rising was in 1745, less than one hundred years after the death of King Charles I) the Tories had sought to restore two different status quo ante’s, and whatever we may think of the Jacobite cause and movement, the first of these, the Restoration, is certainly an argument in favour of reaction.

The folly of the idea that the Tory or conservative is allowed to oppose progressive changes as they are put forward but must accept and defend them once they are made is quite easily demonstrated. If followed to the letter this would mean that we could never attempt to correct a change that has proven to be a mistake. It is no good saying “you cannot turn the clock back”. Not only is this a bad metaphor – the statement is not even literally true – it is a deadly one. To use another metaphor – a more apt one – when you have swerved off a road and are heading towards a cliff it is suicidal to shrug your shoulders, say “what’s done its done” and keeping heading in the same direction.

Perhaps the most bizarre argument I have ever encountered against the idea that a conservative could take the reactionary position was based upon the fact that conservatives are not traditionally opposed to all change but accept change that is in accordance with the rule of law and which is done “little and little”. This, however, is actually an argument against the declaration that conservative and reactionary are mutually exclusive because that declaration is based entirely upon the idea that the conservative must support the present status quo against all changes.

Yes, the conservative accepts certain kinds of change. His position is not that all change is bad – just that the onus of proof lies upon the person who proposes an innovation. The changes he accepts are lawful, accomplished slowly, and on a small-scale. More importantly, however, for a conservative to accept change it must be change that is consistent with and better yet a means of continuity. Furthermore, a conservative can accept changes of a sort that no progressive ever accepts – changes that acknowledge that a progressive innovation has been a mistake and go back to a way that was time-honoured, tested, and true. It is precisely because a conservative can accept this kind of change that he can be a reactionary.

Indeed, Tory principles demand that the conservative be a reactionary in certain situations. The Tory regards society as an organic whole that includes past and future generations as well. He does not accept simple, unmixed, democracy, whether as a constitutional form, or the idea that the majority at any present moment should rule. The voices of past and future generations must be heard as well and since the future generations cannot yet speak the past generations must be their voice against the present generation whose primary concern is always its own interest in the here and now. Therefore if some demagogue or some persistent group of activists is able at a given moment to obtain enough support in the legislative body or even the general public to make a change that goes against the wisdom of the ages embodied in the voices of the past generations passed down to us in tradition, the Tory has the duty to work to undo this change – to take on the role of the reactionary.

What is Conservatism?

The Meaning of Conservatism, 3rd Edition by Roger Scruton, South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine’s Press, 1980, 1984, 2002, 206 pp., $17

By the middle of the 1970s the Left was triumphant throughout the Western world. Marxism was orthodoxy in the university classroom even in classes where politics and economics had no discernable relevance. A battery of fraudulent new departments had been or were in the process of being launched throughout academia which purported to be devoted to the scientific study of this or that but which in reality were simply venues to allow gripes and grievances against Western civilization and its traditions and institutions, to be vented. Governments had committed themselves to the goal of reducing inequality through taxation and social programs, passed regulations and established bureaucratic agencies dedicated to the extirpation of non-egalitarian ideas and attitudes, and more-or-less declared war on those institutions which were believed to foster these non-egalitarian ideas and attitudes, especially the family and the church. They had further committed themselves to a combination of anti-natalism (sexual emancipation, birth control, abortion, etc.) and open borders, liberal immigration, that together comprised a population replacement program that bore an ugly resemblance to Bertolt Brecht’s joke about a Communist government dissolving the old people and electing a new one. Vocal opposition to this program was effectively suppressed by accusations of racism backed, in many countries, by race relations laws.. The poverty of third world countries was regarded among the intelligentsia as the legacy of European colonialism and imperialism rather than the work of the incompetent and kleptocratic dictatorships that had in so many cases replaced the imperial governments and so Western countries were expected to give large amounts of money in foreign aid to prop up those very incompetent and kleptocratic dictatorships.

Then the late 1970s saw a resurgence of the Right that in North America would manifest itself in the Reagan presidency in the United States and to a far lesser extent in the Mulroney premiership in Canada. In the United Kingdom, the resurgence began with Margaret Thatcher’s taking over the leadership of the Conservative Party from Edward Heath in 1975 and culminated in her premiership from 1979 to 1990. Thatcher’s rise to the leadership of the Conservative Party marked the end of the “post-war consensus”, i.e., the agreement of the Conservative Party leadership not to challenge, cancel or undo any of the policies, programs and changes introduced by the Labour Party that had more-or-less been Conservative policy since Clement Attlee’s Labour Party trounced Winston Churchill’s Tories in the 1945 election after World War II. After thirty years of this depressing capitulation to socialism, Thatcher’s leadership breathed new life into both the Conservative Party and the United Kingdom, but she and her ideas met with much skepticism and criticism from other Conservatives, and not just from the “Wets”, i.e., those like Heath who were ideological supporters of the post-war consensus. Statesman Enoch Powell and journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, for example, both High Tories who had little love for the post-war consensus, were highly skeptical towards Thatcher from the beginning, although both later supported her in the leadership crisis that ultimately saw her ousted both as leader of the party and Prime Minister. (1) Among traditional Tories, there was concern that Thatcherism, with its rhetorical emphasis on the free market, personal choice, and democracy, powerful weapons as these concepts were against the enemy of socialism, would replace conservatism with liberalism or American republicanism.

One Tory who had such concerns opted to express them by writing a book outlining the concepts of conservatism. This was Dr. Roger Scruton, philosopher, polymath, and at the time professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College in the University of London. Scruton wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in the late 1970s, as the Thatcher Conservatives were preparing to take office, and it was first published in 1980, shortly after they had come to power in the 1979 election. In Gentle Regrets, the collection of memoirs in which he tells how he came to hold his views, he said that writing this book made him persona non grata in both official Conservative Party circles and left-wing academia. It was also the book upon which his well-deserved reputation as the leading conservative philosopher of our day was built.

Scruton describes his book as a work of dogmatics and acknowledges that in writing it, he was doing something conservatives are usually unwilling to do, i.e., express the conservative instinct or attitude in a formulaic fashion, except in situations of crisis. This reflects a fundamental distinction he makes between conservatism on the one hand and both liberalism and socialism on the other. Conservatism is about real societies as they exist in the past and present, whereas liberalism and socialism are obsessed with finding the formula that will produce an ideal society in the future. In this distinction can be seen the influence of the thought of Michael Oakeshott, Britain’s leading conservative philosopher of the generation prior to Scruton. Oakeshott’s influence, like that of Edmund Burke and G. W. F. Hegel, can be found on almost every page of this book, and Scruton appropriately concluded the preface to the first edition by saying that “it satisfies the first requirement of all conservative thought: it is not original, nor does it try to be”. (p. xii)

Conservatism, Scruton says in his first chapter, begins as an instinct or attitude that arises out of a person’s sense of belonging to something larger than himself, not in the sense of a cause directed towards some ideal, but in the sense of an established social order, that is older than he is and will hopefully outlast him. This order might be that of any number of institutions, such as clubs or churches, but ultimately, at the political level it is that of the person’s society, country, or nation. The conservative instinct consists of a person’s identifying himself with this order, and feeling within himself its “will to live” (p. 10). Conservatism is not, therefore, an unthinking resistance to change, but a reflective rejection of change that would harm or kill the social order, and acceptance of change that helps to preserve and continue that order. Whereas liberals and socialists see politics, i.e., the exercise of government power, as means to external ends, freedom and social justice respectively, the conservative sees society’s government, as containing its own end, the health and life of the social order.

The conservative view of society, therefore, is that it is a living organism. In his second chapter, Scruton contrasts this with liberalism’s view of society as a contract, explaining that liberalism fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between freedom, rights, justice and the individual on the one hand and society and its order on the other. Drawing upon Kant’s understanding of justice which requires that we treat others as ends in themselves and not merely means to ends of our own, Scruton explains that contracts consists of reciprocal promises between individuals, which bestow rights upon each other in the sense of a claim upon the other person to fulfil his promise. This, Scruton says, cannot be the genesis of society, because the existence of an established social order is a precondition for this kind of bargaining.

It would be absurd, he points out, to regard the obligations which parents have towards their children and vice versa in contractual terms. The bonds within a family are transcendent, beyond the realm of contracts negotiated and agreed upon by self-interested individuals, and our duty to fulfil the obligations conferred by those bonds is a matter of piety rather than justice. This is true as well, he argues, of the bonds within civil society. Echoing Burke’s remarks about the “little platoons”, he maintains that the sense of loyalty and affection that we develop early in life towards our families and home, we later extend to the other social establishments we find ourselves in, and ultimately to our societies, nations, and countries in the form of patriotism.

Allegiance is the term for this feeling of affection and loyalty, which begins at the level of the family and rises, in patriotism, to the level of civil society, and one of the most important topics in this book is the relationship between allegiance and authority. If power is the ability to command obedience, authority is legitimate power, i.e., power that is held and exercised by those with a recognized right to hold and exercise it. It is the nature of allegiance to recognize that authority, in our parents as children and in the government of our society as citizen-subjects.

Scruton dismisses the Marxist theory that the concepts of legitimacy and authority are merely ideological constructions designed to justify the holding of power by those who so hold it as being of no practical political relevance regardless of whether it is true or not. Without these concepts we are left with sheer, naked, coercive, power and so clearly we need them. It is the way in which we conceive of our society that helps us to understand it, find meaning in it, and participate in it, that is truly important to politics, and here the idea of legitimacy is vital.

The liberal view of legitimacy, however, that it can only come from a contractual arrangement, is unacceptable to the conservative for the same reasons that the contract theory of society is unacceptable and in his third chapter, in which he discusses the political expression of civil society and its binding customs, culture, and traditions in the state and its constitution, he argues against the related modern concept in which democracy is equated with legitimacy. Democracy, like the social contract, is regarded as dubious by the conservative because it “privileges the living and their immediate interests over past and future generations” (p. 47). It is only by showing respect for the dead, he argues, that the interests of those yet to come can be safeguarded in the present, and therefore for the conservative, democracy must not be absolute but subject to limitations, and must “take place in the context of institutions and procedures that give a voice to absent generations”. (p. 48). This is one reason why conservatives are historically and traditionally, monarchists, because traditional monarchy is just such an institution:

Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood merely as representing the interests of the present generation. He or she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. If the monarch has a voice at all, it is understood precisely in the cross-generational way that is required by the political process. Monarchs are, in a very real sense, the voice of history, and the very accidental way in which they gain office emphasizes the grounds of their legitimacy, in the history of a people, a place and a culture. (pp. 48-49)

The equation of democracy with legitimacy is not the only modern sacred cow that Scruton butchers in this book. Earlier in the same chapter he showed the fallacy of the concept of human rights, which proposes the existence of rights in the absence of any tradition and social context that might secure them and give them meaning and which separates the rights people claim for themselves, from the rights they reciprocally confer on others, in which their own obligations and duties lie. Later, in the next chapter, he takes on the liberal/libertarian idea that the legitimate function of the law is limited to protecting citizens from harm and securing their rights, the “humanitarian” idea that the purpose of law and the penal system is to rehabilitate the offender, and the egalitarian concept of “social justice”. The first is too simplistic, abstract and individualistic. The law is the will of the state, the public face of civil society, and so is an expression of society’s moral consensus. The state punishes crime, the breaking of the law, in order to protect society, to which crime is an expression of antagonism. This view of the penal system, and not the idea of rehabilitation, is actually the more humane, for the rehabilitation view, by separating punishment from the crime to which it is a response and orienting it towards a desired effect in the person punished, subjects the latter to a process that has no clearly defined limits. “Social justice” is an affront to natural law and justice, being based not on the reciprocal rights and obligations that naturally arise between people in ordinary social existence, but on the unnatural ideal of equality.

In each of these cases, Scruton’s arguments against a popular modern notion, arise naturally out of his basic concept of conservatism as the instinct to maintain and preserve the health and life of the social order. This is true as well, of the arguments he presents when he turns to economics in his fifth and sixth chapters. Here he argues for private property against Marxism and socialism in general, but not on the basis of the rights and freedoms of the individual or purportedly scientific economic theory in favour of the free market, as Thatcher and Reagan did. His starting principle is that ownership is a human necessity, because it is through ownership that people are able to perceive physical objects through a lens other than desire, an essential precondition for relating to and interacting with other people in society. Property begins, he argues, not with the factory or marketplace, but with the home, where the family lives and accumulates its belongings. Marxists attack family and property together, and conservatives, who perceive natural affection in the family as the source of the feeling of allegiance that creates the bonds of civil society, must defend the two together against this attack. Scruton defends property, against the British socialist ideas of wealth redistribution as the goal of taxation policy, public ownership as a valid alternative to private monopoly in industries that are not essential public services, and the expropriation of accumulated wealth in his fifth chapter, and against the Marxist defamation of property as the source of social alienation in his sixth. In doing so, he presents the conservative position as a “qualified endorsement of modern capitalism”, rather than the unqualified endorsement of free-market ideologues, and the task of the conservative as being the preservation of the social order from the forces that threaten it in capitalism and socialism alike.

From this, Scruton moves on to offer a defense of the autonomy, not of individuals, but of institutions like the sports team, the family, and the educational institution. By autonomy he means their right to pursue their own internal ends, rather than be compelled to serve external ends imposed upon them from above, such as those of egalitarianism which is particularly destructive because these institutions, like society itself, are fundamentally hierarchical. It is through institutions like these that we participate in society, and it is the job of the state, as the governing body of society, to guard and protect their autonomy rather than to impose external ends like those of egalitarianism upon them. This leads to a discussion, in the eighth chapter, of how authority and power come together to form establishment, the conservative ideal, in both the state and the autonomous institution of society, and finally in the last chapter, of the boundaries between the public and private life of a society.

The implications for public policy of these conservative doctrines, all of which are expressions of that same basic conservative instinct to preserve the health and life of the larger self which is one’s society, are myriad, as Scruton himself says in an axiom towards the very beginning of the book. The purpose of the book was not to prescribe policy, but to express the beliefs regarding life, society, and government that arise out of a conservative frame of mind, and this Scruton has done marvellously. Whatever effect this book may have had on its author’s career, it earned him his place beside Hooker and Burke, Disraeli and Oakeshott, among the leading theorists of conservative thought.

(1) In Powell’s case the support was from the outside. He had left the party in protest over Heath’s compromises, particularly regarding the Common Market, but indicated that he would return if Thatcher retained the leadership, which, of course, she did not.

We and I

Ayn Rand, who fled the Soviet Union as a young woman to become a screenwriter and novelist in the United States, is remembered for her ultra-individualistic philosophy, a blend of classical liberalism, Nietzcheanism, and materialism that she called Objectivism. Her message about the heroic individual, defying all collective restraint in pursuit of an enlightened selfishness, is tiresomely proclaimed from every page of her lengthy novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Amidst all the atheistic and materialistic dross of her writings, there is a nugget of gold to be found, however, in her early novella Anthem. This short novel, first published in 1938, depicts a future dystopian society in which a collectivist government has banned the word “I” and its cognates as “unspeakable” and rigidly enforced this ban with capital punishment to the point that most of the members of this society can now only think in the collective plural. Her hero is a young man, a Promethean type like all of Rand’s heroes, the individuality of whom, the intense conditioning processes of his society has failed to eliminate.

One gets the impression from Rand’s writings, that she would have preferred a society that is a mirror image of the one she has depicted in Anthem, a society in which the word “we” and the concept it represents, has been eliminated. The dark irony of this, of course, is that such a society would be just as totalitarian as the one in her novel. I suspect this is what Whittaker Chambers picked up on when, in reviewing Atlas Shrugged for National Review in 1957, he said that from almost every page of the novel “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘ To the gas chambers — go!’”. (1)

Nevertheless, Rand made a very important point. A society in which individuality was ruthlessly stamped out, in which people are forbidden to think and speak of themselves as “I”, would be a horrible society. This Rand knew from her own experience, as she was twelve years old when the Bolsheviks, a revolutionary party of extreme collectivist views, took over her native Russia and turned it into a totalitarian state. The reason such a society would be so horrible is that individuality is an essential and important part of our nature as human beings and it is contrary to our good and to the happiness that is derived from that good to suppress human individuality.

In recognizing this, it is important that we do not lose sight of the fact that the word “we” also represents an essential part of our human nature, one that is at least as important as our individuality. Try and imagine a society in which there was only “I” and no “we”. This would eliminate the “we” of marriage in which a man and a woman sacrifice part of their individuality to bind themselves and their lives together as one. It would further eliminate the “we” of family, the basic human collective to which each of us looks for such basic human needs as love and security. It would eliminate the “we” of friendship and any other human bond formed by sharing common interests and activities, needs and wants, likes and dislikes, pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings.

An individualist might interject that he has no objection to collectives, provided that they are voluntary associations that individuals willingly join and from which they can withdraw at any time. Surely, however, the “we” that is the family is more important, more fundamental to the human good and to human happiness, than the business partnership or the social club. Yet while the latter are voluntary associations, the former is not. It is held together by relationships that are permanent, based on blood, and which are not voluntary, relationships such as that of a mother to her daughter, a father to his son, and a brother to a sister.

Those who see only the individual, the “I” and who only recognize the collective, the “we”, when it is a voluntary association of “I”s are as mistaken as those who see only the collective and insist that the good of the “we” requires that the rights and freedoms, the dreams and aspirations, of the “I” be suppressed. Indeed, their mistake is one and the same, a failure to recognize that man is by nature both individual and collective, both “I” and “we”, and that the “I” and the “we” both need each other.

Both versions of this mistake are paths that lead to the same destination – a totalitarian society with a tyrannical government. This type of society and this type of government are the enemies not only of the individual and his freedom, the “I”, but of the plurality of smaller collectives that make up a traditional, organic society, the many different “we”s of family, neighborhood, community, church, guild, and club. The essential, defining, characteristic of a totalitarian society is not merely that it is a collective but that it insists upon being the only collective, the only “we”. A totalitarian society is therefore a mass society, i.e., a society in which most of the population are individuals who have been uprooted and alienated from the many smaller “we’s” of traditional, organic, society and thrown together into one large mass collective that is organized from the top by a large, highly centralized government, that regards itself as the voice of this one big collective “We”. A government with a totalitarian ideology may create a mass society from the top down by striving to eliminate or at least minimize the influence of all the smaller rival “we”s that it looks upon with jealousy and suspicion. Conversely, liberal individualism, by uprooting individuals from the traditional, organic, collectives of family, church, and community, creates the conditions that favour a totalitarian government that is anything but liberal in the best sense of the word.

Plato and Aristotle taught that men could only achieve happiness by attaining the good, i.e., by finding and fulfilling the end for which they were made and fitted. To do so, men must cultivate virtue. The good of the whole society, however, was greater than the individual goods of its members, and it is for the purpose of achieving this higher good that society is organized politically with a government and laws.

As true as this concept of the ancients is it requires balance, otherwise it can be twisted to serve the purposes of totalitarian collectivism. The classical liberal doctrine of the rights and liberties of the individual provides one sort of balance, but it is an insufficient balance. Liberal individualism has the effect of breaking down organic society into alienated individuals who form masses, creating just the sort of conditions that lend themselves to the rise of totalitarian collectivism.

The necessary balance, that harmonizes the Platonic concept of the good of the whole with the liberal defense of the freedom of the individual, is provided by the plurality of small collectives that together make up organic society. It is only in the framework of the organic society of family, friends, and neighbours that the individual can speak his “I” and expect to be heard. In mass society his “I” is lost among thousands, millions, even billions of other “I”s. The diffusion of man’s collective nature through a plurality of “we”s helps keep the big “we” of the society as a whole from being distorted from its good purposes and becoming an instrument of oppression. It is only in traditional, organic society with its plurality of small collectives that both the “we” and “I” of human nature have their fullest expression.

(1) http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/222482/big-sister-watching-you/flashback/page/0/2

Why Do We Put Up With It?

Here’s an idea. Why don’t we move to Japan, loudly announce our unwillingness to live by Japan’s rules, show utter disrespect for the Tenno, and file a lawsuit against the Japanese government demanding that Japan change its ways to accommodate us. How far do you think we would be able to get with that?

The answer is that we would not get very far at all because Japan has a far more sensible attitude towards this sort of thing than we do and would simply not put up with it. We could learn a lesson or two from the Land of the Rising Sun.

Recently the Canadian news media treated us to a story of how certain immigrants who had become permanent residents in Ontario had launched a legal challenge against our country over the requirements we impose on those who have moved here and desire and seek citizenship. It is the Oath of Citizenship that they take umbrage with and specifically the part of the Oath where the new citizen is required to swear allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and her heirs and successors. These would-be new Canadians maintain that this is a violation of their rights and that they should be allowed to pledge their loyalty to the country without swearing fealty to its Sovereign.

It apparently did not occur to them that an oath of allegiance to the Queen would be implicit within a pledge of loyalty to the country of Canada. For Elizabeth II is Queen of Canada, Sovereign over our country through her Parliament in Ottawa. Our elected governors are her ministers, who are chosen by the people to govern in her name. That is the nature of our country and a pledge of allegiance to the Queen is therefore implicit in a pledge of loyalty to Canada. An oath of allegiance to Canada that did not imply allegiance to the Queen would be a worthless oath. The Canada that the person who swore such an oath would be pledging allegiance to, would not be the real Canada, the Canada that actually exists, but some fictional construction. What we are looking for in new Canadians, the reason we have an Oath of citizenship at all, is not loyalty to “my idea of Canada” or some such nebulous and self-referential concept but to the actual country.

Therefore, if these litigious would-be Canadians were to be allowed to swear loyalty to Canada without the explicit oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, either, a) they would not be swearing loyalty to the Queen in doing so and the oath would be worthless to us because it would not be a pledge of loyalty to the real Canada or b) they would be implicitly swearing loyalty to the Queen in swearing loyalty to Canada and would have gained nothing because the same objections they make to the explicit oath of loyalty to the Queen would apply as well to the implicit oath of loyalty to the Queen contained in the oath of loyalty to Canada.

That an oath of loyalty to the country would implicitly contain an oath of loyalty to the Queen is in a sense, even truer of Canada, than it is of the United Kingdom. The country of Canada is built upon the choice of the Loyalists to remain loyal subjects rather than join in the republican rebellion. That is our country’s history, roots, and tradition and it is a fundamental part of our collective identity. Our loyalty to the monarchy has played a significant part in the proudest moments of our country’s history, such as when the British army and the Canadians successfully fought off the American invasion together in the early 19th Century, and when Canada declared war on Nazi Germany to fight side by side with Great Britain, in the name of our common king, in the greatest armed conflict of the 20th Century.

Those who wish to eliminate the monarchy from our national identity create a vacuum which they must inevitably fill with the silliest of things. I have actually heard people say that it is our socialized health care that makes us who we are as Canadians and distinguishes us from the Americans. What a vapid and moronic thing to say! The Tommy Douglas health care system referred to, whatever else, good or bad, one might say about it, is less than one hundred years old, dating back to the 1960s. Our country was brought together in Confederation a century prior to that. One wonders what those people who think Canada’s identity is based on socialist health care are saying now that the United States has Obamacare.

But I digress. An argument one sometimes hears from those misguided souls who wish to downplay the monarchy and other institutions and symbols we have inherited from Britain is the claim that they are only of significance to Canadians descended from people from the British Isles and are therefore an insult to those whose ancestors came from other parts of the world. This argument is a non-sequitur – even if it were true, that the monarchy is only of significance to Canadians of British descent, it would not follow from this that the institution would be an insult to others. In fact, the real insult to Canadians of non-British stock is the suggestion that the monarchy should be downplayed so as not to offend them. This suggestion implies that they or their ancestors put no thought into what they were doing when they moved to Canada and came to the country in ignorance of the fact that it was a Commonwealth country, built on a history of Loyalism, with a parliamentary monarchy as its constitution. For if they or their ancestors were aware of these things about Canada when they chose to come here, then, in the act of coming here they chose to become a part of all of that and to accept the institutions of Canada, including her monarchy, as their own.

There is an important difference between traditional Canadian pluralism and the contemporary left-wing multiculturalism that is afflicting our country today. The former was all about integrating people of different backgrounds into Canada in such a way that without having to give up everything they brought with them from their ancestral lands, the British traditions of Canada, from the monarchy to the Rights of Englishmen, became their own. The latter was all about stripping Canada of as much of its British traditions as possible and downplaying the rest while encouraging newcomers not to give up anything and to keep everything they brought from their ancestral lands.

The great Canadian historian W. L. Morton, at one time head of the department of history at the University of Manitoba, and author of my favourite one-volume history of Canada, The Kingdom of Canada, explained the essential role of the monarchy in traditional Canadian pluralism:

[T]he moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant, Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact, there is no pressure for uniformity, there is no Canadian way of life. Any one, French, Irish, Ukrainian or Eskimo, can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself. (1)

When he said “there is no Canadian way of life” by “Canadian way of life” he meant a universal, cultural, homogeneity throughout the entire country. That has never existed in Canada at that level. At Confederation there were three major people groups with their own cultures and way of life – English Canadians who spoke English and were mostly Protestant, French Canadians who spoke French and were mostly Roman Catholic, and North American Indians. (2) There were varying degrees of homogeneity among these different groups, with the most homogeneity among the French Canadians who were united in religion as well as language and the most diversity among the Indians whose languages and religion varied according to their tribe, the degree to which they had adopted either the English or the French culture, and, of course, which one they had adopted. English Canadians fell in the middle. They were unified in language, but while they were mostly Protestant in religion, that included English Anglicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and any number of non-conformists sects. Allegiance to the Crown was the principle around which these vastly different groups were able to come together to build a country.

Allegiance to the monarchy meant something different to each of these groups. The people who became the English Canadians had originally been Loyalists, i.e., people who remained loyal to the British Crown when the Thirteen Colonies revolted, and fled to Canada to escape persecution for their stance, after the American Revolution. Allegiance to the monarchy defined who they were.

To the French Canadians, their decision to remain loyal to the king under whose sovereignty they had only recently come rather than to join the American revolution, had secured for them their language, religion, and culture. The American leaders had wanted to make Canada entirely English speaking and Protestant but the British government had promised the French government that French Canadians would be able to keep their language, religion, and culture when the French king ceded the sovereignty of Canada to King George III in the Treaty of Paris. This was one of the things the British government and the American leaders quarrelled over. On the eve of the American Revolution, the British Parliament passed and the king signed into law, the Quebec Act, making those same guarantees directly to the French Canadian people. Had Canada joined the American revolutionaries, or had Canada been ceded to the United States at the end of the American Revolution, the French Canadians would not have been able to retain their religion, language, and culture.

For the Indians, the Crown was and is the party with whom their tribes are in a treaty relationship. (3) This continues to be important to them to this day, a fact of which we were recently reminded. (4)

While each group had its own reasons for allegiance to the Crown, that were very different from the reasons of the other two, these reasons added up to a common allegiance as the basis upon which the three groups could come together to form a country. Loyalty to the Crown is absolutely fundamental to Canadian identity. It is entirely appropriate, therefore, that our country insist that those who wish to be integrated into Canada as citizens make a pledge of the allegiance that is the basis of Canadian unity.

In fact, most immigrants applying for citizenship have no objection to this requirement. The legal challenge to the oath requirement, which has been so widely reported, is not coming from some broadly supported movement but from three individual immigrants.

Why do these three object to swearing the oath?

One is a man of Irish origins whose father died in the republican cause and who therefore believes that it is a violation of his rights to be made to swear an oath to the Queen. Another is a woman who objects to the oath on the grounds of her Afrocentric Rastafari ideology and because of Britain’s historical involvement in the slave trade. The third is an Israeli of strong anti-monarchical, republican, sentiment.

Whether or not these are good and valid reasons for these three individuals to personally refuse to swear allegiance to the Queen, they are not, separately or collectively, valid reasons for Canada to set the oath aside as a requirement. The two men came here from countries that are republics with no crowned monarch. If republicanism is so important to them, they are welcome to return to Ireland and Israel or to move to the United States if that would suit them better.

One of the reasons they are giving for their demand that the oath to the Queen be removed is that it is “discriminatory”. They claim that it is discriminatory because it discriminates in favour of those who have no problem swearing loyalty to the Queen against those who do. They claim that it is discriminatory because only immigrants applying for citizenship are required to swear the oath, not those who are born here or are born to Canadian citizens abroad.

Since progressives, over the last sixty years or so, have successfully conditioned most of us to shut our brains down, curl up into the fetal position, and cry uncle at the sound of the word “discrimination”, some explanation will be required of what should be common sense and obvious to anybody.

In the most basic sense of the word to discriminate simply means to distinguish, to make or to observe a distinction or a difference. If you can tell the difference between apples and oranges you are, in so doing, discriminating. There is nothing wrong with discrimination in this sense of the word.

Discrimination is also used in a narrower sense to refer to the act of making a distinction which is to the advantage of one or some against others. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this kind of discrimination either. All laws are by nature discriminatory in this sense. The law that says that is a criminal act to kill your neighbour, discriminates in favour of the non-murderer against the murderer. The law that forbids theft discriminates in favour of people who don’t steal against those who do. Even scientific laws are discriminatory. The law of gravity discriminates against those who jump off a cliff and in favour of those who don’t.

When is discrimination wrong?

Discrimination is wrong when it is unjust and discrimination is only unjust when those who have a legitimate right to be regarded as and treated the same are instead regarded as and treated differently. If the law forbids littering, and prescribes a certain penalty for littering, then you, your neighbour Bob, and everybody else who lives under the authority of the law, have a legitimate right to be treated the same under that law. If you and Bob are both guilty of littering and are both caught and arrested you have the legitimate right to except that you will receive the same sentence as Bob. If, the judge slaps you with the full penalty but lets Bob off because Bob is a member of all the same clubs the judge belongs to, this is a case of unjust discrimination.

Those who do not wish to swear the oath to the queen, and who claim it is discriminatory that they be required to do so, would like us to believe that it is this last kind of discrimination. People who are born into Canadian citizenship are entitled to all the benefits of Canadian citizenship without having to swear an oath to the Queen whereas those who have moved here from elsewhere have to swear the oath to obtain the benefits. If, however, this constitutes unjust discrimination, then so would the requirement that immigrants swear an oath to Canada before becoming citizens. In fact, placing any requirement of any sort on those who apply for citizenship that is not also placed on those born into citizenship would qualify as unjust discrimination if the requirement that they swear an oath to the Queen is unjust discrimination.

If a requirement placed on those applying for citizenship in a country is unjust discrimination because it is not also placed upon those born into citizenship that means that a country has no right to place requirements on people before they become citizens, that a society has no right to set rules as to how someone coming into the society from the outside can become a full member of the society.

Clearly that cannot be the case. If a society has no right to set rules as to how someone can join it from the outside then it is not a society. A society has every right to distinguish between those who are born into it and those who enter it from the outside at least up until the point where they are granted full citizenship. Unfortunately, liberalism, which teaches that a society is an artificial construction that exists for the sole purpose of serving the personal interests of generic individuals, has clouded the minds of many in this day and age as to the true nature of a society. A society is much more than this. It is a living organism, in which its individual members are joined into an organic whole like the cells in a body, in which generation succeeds generation the way new cells replace old, dying cells. As the body produces the new cells it needs to replace its old ones from its own genetic template, so the present generation of society gives birth to the next generation and raises it to take its place in the organic whole of the society. People can join the society from the outside, just as a branch can be grafted onto a tree or an organ can be transplanted from one body into another, but the tree can also reject the graft and the body can reject the organ. The more compatible the grafted branch or transplanted organ are with the hosts into which they are placed the more likely they are to be accepted. That is the nature of things.

In this case we have an organic society which began by the grafting of three different branches – the tree metaphor works better here as the body metaphor, thanks to Mary Shelley, would produce some unfortunate associations – onto a common trunk, the trunk of the monarchy, the parliamentary system in which the monarchy is incorporated, and the Common Law and rights attached to the monarchy, and of which the monarchy is a symbol. Now we have three wild branches, asking to be grafted into the tree, but in such a way that they are connected to the other branches, but not the trunk. That does not sound like the makings of a successful graft.

The real problem here, however, is not the handful of immigrants who have demanded we change our citizenship requirements to suit them. While the current three are not the first immigrants to contest the oath requirement – they are continuing a challenge first launched by an immigrant from Trinidad who died last year and who started several such challenges beginning in the 1990s - the total number who have contested the oath is negligible. Most people have the sense to realize that if they wish to move to and become part of a society they will have to adjust to the ways, traditions, institutions and rules of that society rather than expecting it to change to accommodate them. Most people have the decency to understand that accusing the institution around which a country has been built of being a symbol of racism, tyranny, and injustice is inconsistent with a desire to become a part of that country.

No, the problem is not these immigrants themselves. The problem is with us. We are the ones who put up with this nonsense. We are the ones who are allowing a handful of malcontents to waste our courts’ time with these frivolous lawsuits. We are the ones who allow people to come here, insult the institution at the heart of our constitution, and demand that we change our country to suit them, rather than telling them that if they don’t like our country’s constitution, institutions, and rules then they didn’t have to move here, are free to go elsewhere, and are no longer wanted or welcome here.

Progressive thought is the root of the problem. A progressive or forward looking person is someone who thinks that to arrive at future happiness we must leave the road cleared, paved, and marked by the landmarks of the past and skip merrily blindfolded along down the road of social, cultural, political and technological innovation. The attitude towards the monarchy, which progressivism tends to produce in Canada, is at best one of ambivalence and indifference and at worst of outright hostility. The progressive emphasizes the democratic aspect of our constitution and tends to regard the monarchy as out-dated or irrelevant.

Ironically, in taking this position, progressives show their own thought to be outdated. An institution like the monarchy is classy, and therefore timeless, and can never be outdated. It is the championing of democracy against monarchy that is outdated. As the great Canadian humourist and political scientist Stephen Leacock put it:

Look back a little in the ages to where ragged Democracy howls around the throne of defiant Kingship. This is a problem that we have solved, joining the dignity of Kingship with the power of Democracy; (5)

The progressive view of immigration is also a problem. Progressives, whether of the liberal or the socialist variety, tend to be believers in the nonsensical and contradictory concept of universal nationalism – that their country is a “universal nation”, membership in which everyone in the world is entitled to. Whereas ordinary patriotic people regard their country and its institutions in high esteem, and except people moving into their country and joining their society to adjust to the society, progressives hold their country and its traditions in low esteem, and see large scale immigration as a means of changing their country and getting rid of its institutions and traditions. Ordinary patriotic people consider it a privilege and honour to live in their country and be a member of their society, and expect newcomers to take that same attitude. Progressives, on the other hand, think it is the highest privilege and honour for a country that even a single immigrant would deign to come to their country, and that the country should show its gratitude by bending over backwards to make whatever alterations are necessary to accommodate the immigrant. Progressives seem to believe that any disagreement with them on this matter can only come out of irrational prejudice towards and hatred of other people and do not hesitate to accuse anyone who expresses disagreement with them of the bigotry and racism. Meanwhile, they take great offence when their patriotism is called into question over their not-so-subtle contempt for their own country, its people, and its traditions.

There is a great deal of short-sightedness in the progressive position. Those who refuse to look deeply into the past will never be able to see far into the future and are oblivious to what is before them in the present. By dismissing our country’s history as our “colonial past” and our traditional institutions as “outdated relics” progressives blind themselves to both the continuing and contemporary importance and relevance of the monarchy and to the harm their approach to immigration has done, is doing, and will do to our country in the future.

The way to deal with the handful of immigrants who want us to change our citizenship laws is simple. It is to tell them that if they are not interested in joining our society on our terms, then they are no longer welcome to join our society on any terms, and we are no longer interested in having them as citizens.

Dealing with the progressive thought that has pervaded our country and which hinders us from giving the appropriate response to these immigrants will be more difficult.

(1) W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961, 1972) p. 85

(2) It is no longer fashionable to call this group of people “Indians” and many people consider the continued use of the term to be an insult to the people so termed. All other terms, especially the one currently in vogue “First Nations”, are to varying degrees politically correct. My intentional use of the term “Indians” is not based upon a desire to insult these people but rather a refusal to submit to the tyranny of political correctness.

(3) http://www.canadiancrown.com/first-nations-treaties-with-the-crown.html


(4) http://www.timescolonist.com/opinion/op-ed/comment-harper-must-respect-tradition-time-and-place-1.48342


(5) Stephen Leacock, “Greater Canada: an appeal”, in Alan Bowker, ed., The Social Criticism of Stephen Leacock (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 9. The article first appeared in 1907 in University Magazine and was given as an address to the Empire Club of Canada in March of that year.

Green Toryism

How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case For An Environmental Conservatism by Roger Scruton, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, 457 pp., US$ 29

What colour is conservatism?

The answer to that question, historically and traditionally, has been blue. To be even more precise, it has been royal blue. To be conservative is to be on the side of tradition, custom, religion, old and established ways of doing things, the ancient constitution of church and state. Historically, this has meant that conservatives have defended royalty against modern forces that seek to do away with it. For this reason, the official colour of the Conservative Party is the colour long associated with royalty and aristocracy, blue.

Here in Canada, however, there are those who believe that the traditional conservatism of Britain and Canada shares common ground with the political left in their mutual suspicion of classical liberalism. Those who identify as conservatives, but who wish to emphasize this perceived common ground with the left, borrow the colour of the radical left and are known as “Red Tories”. (1) They could not have picked a left-wing symbol that is further removed from what conservatism stands for. The red of the left stands for the blood spilled in violent revolution.

With the publication this June of How to Think Seriously About the Planet, by philosopher and true blue Tory Roger Scruton, a new colour is contending for a place on the conservative banner: environmental green.

We have become accustomed, in recent decades, to think of concern for the environment as being the intellectual property of the left. The left encourages this, claiming the environmentalist movement as its own, and denouncing the right as supporting the despoilers of the environment. Conversely, conservatives have often been willing to concede the environment to the left. We find it difficult to take seriously the concerns of environmentalists when they so often seem to be hysterical alarmists who resemble Chicken Little running around warning everybody that the sky is falling.

In How to Think Seriously About the Planet, Roger Scruton makes the case that concern for the environment would be more at home on the right than on the left and outlines a conservative approach that he convincingly argues would handle the matter of the preservation of our physical environment better than the leftist approach currently favoured by the environmentalist movement.

He begins by addressing the matter of the left’s perceived monopoly on the environment, and saying that “that image is highly misleading”, a contention he backs up by providing a brief outline of the history of the environmentalist movement in Britain and the United States, showing how conservatives were involved from the beginning alongside those of other persuasions. If this is the case, why do conservatives and environmentalists so often seem to be at odd with one another?

Environmentalists distrust conservatives, Scruton says, because they “have been habituated to see conservatism as the ideology of free enterprise, and free enterprise as an assault on the earth’s resources, with no motive beyond short-term gain.” (p. 7) This seems to be a very accurate diagnosis, one which shows that the environmentalists have erred both in the way they see conservatism and the way they see the free market. This error is not entirely their fault, however, because many “conservatives” have contributed to this understanding of conservatism and the market. It is, however, an error because conservatism is not first and foremost about the free market.

If conservatism is not “the ideology of free enterprise”, what is it?

Scruton writes:

Conservatism, as I understand it, means the maintenance of the social ecology. It is true that individual freedom is a part of that ecology, since without it social organisms cannot adapt. But freedom is not the only goal of politics. Conservatism and conservation are two aspects of a single long-term policy, which is that of husbanding resources and ensuring their renewal. These resources include the social capital embodied in laws, customs, and institutions; they also include the material capital contained in the environment, and the economic capital contained in a free but law-governed economy. (p. 9)

This is an excellent short definition of conservatism (2) that shows exactly why conservatism and environmentalism should go together. Conservatism is about preserving and passing on a heritage we have received from past generations to future generations. That heritage includes the sort of things conservatives have traditionally valued, which Scruton in the above quotation describes as social capital, but it is also includes the sort of things environmentalists cherish, our physical surroundings, places and the beauty and life contained therein.

If conservatism is about preserving what we have received from past generations – social institutions, associations, and customs, our physical environment, economic and political freedom, etc. – and passing it on to future generations, it follows that conservatives will understand the purpose of politics in these terms. Scruton says that the purpose of politics, as conservatives understand it, is “to maintain a vigilant resistance to the entropic forces that threaten our social and ecological equilibrium” and that it “concerns the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems – systems that correct themselves in response to destabilizing change” (pp. 9, 11). Left wing groups and movements, on the other hand, tend to see the purpose of politics as “mobilizing society towards a goal “ (p. 34).

This left wing tendency can clearly be seen in the environmentalist movement today. The response of many environmentalist organizations, to potential threats to the environment, is to sound the alarm and try and rally society behind the cause of saving the environment from those threats. This means that environmentalist causes tend to be conceived of on the largest scale possible causing environmentalists to look to government action on the highest level possible as the solution. Scruton believes that a conservative approach, that treats the environment as homeostatic system to be watched over and adjusted from time to time to maintain the equilibrium would be more appropriate and that the left wing approach is a significant cause of the ineffectiveness of this kind of environmentalism. (3)

The objection can be made that today we are dealing with environmental problems on a scale so large that they require large scale government action. Currently, the issue that is most likely to be pointed to as an example of such a problem is climate change. In his second chapter, Scruton addresses this objection. After pointing out that it serves the interests of those who believe in extensive government action and control for problems to be treated like world threatening catastrophes, and that previous alarms such as Paul Ehlrich’s predictions about global overpopulation and – ironically – the global cooling warming of the 1970’s preceded the current concern with global warming, Scruton addresses the hot topic of anthropogenic global warming. He presents the claims of those arguing for a worst case scenario and those of the skeptics, treating both sides with respect. The greenhouse effect was established as a scientific phenomenon as far back as the 1860’s, he says, and global warming and cooling are both “fairly routine occurrences”, with human activity such as the release of greenhouse gasses being one of many factors that contribute to both. If the worst case scenario is true, however, if the survival of our species is under an immediate threat by the emission of greenhouse gasses, the action that it will be necessary for us to take will require collective cooperation, which he argues is best rooted in a sense of community. “It is precisely to the definition and maintenance of this ‘we’” he writes “ that conservative politics of the kind I shall defend is directed.” (p. 68)

Perhaps the most important theme of this book is the question of what motivates people to act in ways which preserve the environment. There are various motivations to act in ways which harm the environment, but these tend to be variations of the basic human desire to pass the costs of our actions onto others while claiming the benefits for ourselves. Environmentalists recognize this motivation, especially when they see it in the actions of large corporations, but, as Scruton points out, the capacity for governments to export their costs onto others and into the future is much larger. So what then would motivate us to bear the costs of our actions ourselves and to act in ways which will preserve our environment and the natural capital and beauty contained within it for future generations?

Scuton’s answer, in one word, is oikophilia. This word, which seems to be of Scruton’s own coinage, and which is derived from the same Greek word as the more familiar English words economy and ecology, means the love of home. That means more than just the love of the building you live in. The oikos, Scruton writes, “means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile” and it is a place “that is not just mine and yours, but ours” (p. 227). In explaining how oikophilia is a motivation to preserve the environment, Scruton points to the classic expression of conservative thought in the antirevolutionary writings of Edmund Burke. Burke saw society as being an association in which past, present, and future generations are united, and concern for future generations is a duty owed to past generations. He taught that people belong to “little platoons” – small social associations such as families, churches and clubs and it is in the intimacy of these associations that public affection is born and spreads outward. Scruton draws out the environmental implications of these ideas – out of love for our ancestors and descendents, in our little platoon in society, we are to dutifully maintain the home/oikos we have inherited from past generations and to pass it on to future generations.

An obvious implication of all of this is that the work of maintaining and protecting the environment ought to be done on the local level. Throughout this book Scruton is a consistent advocate of local groups and communities acting to preserve their local environment as being preferable to attempts to protect the environment on a global scale. Government has a role to play in preserving the environment, but it can also contribute to the problem of environmental irresponsibility when it confiscates the problems and responsibilities of smaller groups, generating moral hazard.

The idea that environmental responsibility is rooted in oikophilia has implications for how we conceive of the environment itself. A home is not something that we find for ourselves in nature untouched by man. Scruton is critical of the idea in American environmentalism, of thinking of the environment as wilderness, something to be valued for not being influenced and shaped by man. Nor is a home something that we value only for its utility, its usefulness to us. We build, shape and decorate our homes, which we value for their beauty as well as their utility, and try to make as aesthetically pleasing to ourselves as possible. If our environment, our surroundings, is to be cared for as a home, this means that we will be as concerned about how it looks as we are in conserving the natural resources contained within it. In his eighth chapter Scruton shows how concern for beauty, connected with a sense of the sacred, has traditionally inspired people to care for their surroundings. He indicts modernism in architecture for creating buildings to stand out rather than to fit in to an aesthetic whole and indicts functionalism for designing buildings that become obsolete when their original purpose disappears.

How To Think Seriously About the Planet will probably meet with objections from two quarters – the kind of “conservative” who seems to believe in nothing but the free market and the kind of environmentalist who is wed to activism, government control, and international agreements – both of whom agree about little else, but would come together to dismiss Scruton’s classical conservative notions of tradition, loyalty, and the home as antiquated mysticism. For those of us who still share these ideas, however, this book makes an excellent argument for the care and upkeep of our physical surroundings as part of the heritage we hold in trust for those who will follow us.

(1) In the United States, states that tend to vote Republican are called “red states” and states that tend to vote Democrat are called “blue states”. This is unrelated to the Red Tory phenomenon in Canada.

(2) For his much more in depth explanation of conservatism, see Roger Scruton’s earlier The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980).

(3) Another such homeostatic system, according to Scruton, is the market economy under the rule of law. While free enterprise and national loyalty are frequently condemned by conventional left-wing environmentalists, whatever problems exist within a national market are exacerbated by attempts to replace the market with socialism, or to create a market that transcends national boundaries. Scruton explains why this is. In each case accountability is removed increasing irresponsibility. In a socialist economy laws fail to hold enterprises accountable because they are owned by the same entity that makes the law. In an international free market, multinational corporations are not accountable to any one set of laws. This same unaccountability, Scruton also notes, exists among environmentalist NGOs, which, unlike traditional civil associations, “often exist purely for the sake of their goals” (p. 28) and neither respond to nor desire feedback from their supporters and are accountable only to themselves.